Today we sent out the January 2010 GoGrid Customer Update to all GoGrid customers. We wanted to ensure that all people who are interested in GoGrid have access to the latest and greatest information coming from our headquarters so the full newsletter is posted below. If you want to get regular updates similar to this newsletter, I recommend that you subscribe to the GoGrid blog RSS feed, subscribe to blog post via email, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (January 2010):

Hello Michael,

On behalf of everyone here at GoGrid, I want to wish you a very successful 2010!  We are starting the year off with a bang that includes some exciting new developments that I want to share with you in this edition of the GoGrid Newsletter.  Here are the specific topics:

1. New Features and System Enhancements
2. GoGrid CDN: New Singapore and Paris Points of Presence (POPs)
3. New Partner GSIs
4. Preventative Power Maintenance
5. End-of-Life: CentOS 5.1 w/Apache &  RHEL 5.1 w/Apache operating systems
6. New CentOS 5.3 & RHEL 5.4 base operating systems
7. Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor your GoGrid Servers
8. Hosting for Haiti

New Features and System Enhancements

---

The next GoGrid software release is scheduled for Tuesday, February 9, 2010 and includes the following new features and system enhancements:
GoGrid Dedicated Server ordering, provisioning, and support via the portal

We will offer three dedicated server options via the GoGrid portal with pricing starting at only $200/month.  GoGrid Dedicated Servers use the GoGrid IP address space, support power cycling, and are visible in the new List View tab located in the GoGrid portal.  The dedicated servers can be load balanced, connected to cloud storage, and managed via the GoGrid UI, providing a unique solution that combines the flexibility of the cloud with the control of dedicated hardware.
GoGrid Dedicated Servers support the following operating systems: Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008.  Dedicated server hardware configurations and pricing details will be available on the GoGrid wiki the day of the software release.

Edit Load Balancer API Support

The GoGrid API will allow you to add and remove an IP address from an existing load balancer. This means you can add or remove a virtual or dedicated server from an existing load balancer without downtime.  The feature is great for rapidly scaling web and app servers in real time.

List View Tab

The GoGrid portal will contain a new tab called List View. The List View tab displays virtual and dedicated servers, Cloud Storage, and load balancing details, including: host name, IP addresses, operating system type, and storage utilization, in list form.  The list view makes it easier to manage large server deployments using a single convenient view.

New Links

Three new links will be visible in the GoGrid portal.  The new links make accessing the GoGrid Wiki, Forums, and API tool easier.  The links are visible in the Support and My Account tabs.

New Feature Webinar
If you have questions about any of the new features, sign up for a live demo given by the GoGrid Product Team.
Click here to reserve your seat: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/725449257
Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST

GoGrid CDN

---

GoGrid CDN customers that deliver content to Asia and Europe will be happy to learn that we will soon roll out two new Points of Presence (POPs):
Singapore: Along with our POPs in Hong Kong and Tokyo, our new Singapore POP boosts our already high-speed delivery of rich media to and from Asia. This newly installed state-of-the-art hardware supports all of our services including live and on demand Windows Media and Flash (FMS3.5) streaming services, web site acceleration and our industry leading reporting and analytics suite. Activate your account today and discover why more and more leading Asian web properties such as Asian Golf TV, QQ, Pixnet and Ninja Saga all use the GoGrid CDN.
Paris: Already strong in Europe, GoGrid will soon be even stronger with the addition of yet another POP, this one in Paris, France. The new Parisian POP will support all of our whole site delivery services, full Windows Media, Flash (FMS 3.5), and Silverlight streaming services as well as our rock solid live streaming service. Contact us today and learn why top tier European companies have partnered with GoGrid CDN for their European and global content distribution needs.
The Singapore POP will roll out in a couple of weeks and the Paris POP will rollout out in a few months.  Please feel free to contact your Account Manager with any questions.

New Partner GSIs

---

We have rolled out five new Partner GSIs.  A PartnerGSI is a publicly available MyGSI (GoGrid Server Image) with the partner’s software preinstalled and preconfigured. Many of our partners specialize in internet security, backup, monitoring, web apps, compliance, and application scaling.  Check out our new PartnerGSIs:

• Gigaspaces
• Mailsites
• CohesiveFT
• Tapin Systems
• Objectivity

Visit the GoGrid Exchange to learn more.

Preventative Power Maintenance

---

There will be a preventive maintenance performed on UPS 1, 2, 3 and 4 on 2/01 and 2/02 2010
The maintenance schedule will be completed in 2 phases.

1. Monday February 1st  – Preventive maintenance performed on UPS 3 and 4. Each unit WILL be put into bypass
2. Tuesday February 2nd  – Preventive Maintenance of UPS 1 and 2. Each unit WILL be put into bypass

There is no downtime expected during this maintenance schedule.

When: February 1st 10:00am – 5:00pm and February 2nd 10:00am – 5:00pm
Why: UPS maintenance is required to continue to provide consistent, uninterrupted power to our customers

End-Of-Life Server Images

---

The below Linux images will be End-of-Life’d effective 02/09/2010:

• CentOS 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2
• RHEL 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2

These images will no longer be available in the GoGrid portal for deployment once they are retired. We will continue to support all current Linux base operating systems. If you would like to use the EoL’d images after February 9th you will need to create your own GoGrid Server Image (using the myGSI feature) before February 9th. MyGSI allows you to keep server images in Cloud Storage for future use.  Additional Information about myGSIs can be found here:

• GoGrid Wiki MyGSI Entry

You can also find more information about this on this GoGrid Blog post which includes some Frequently Asked Questions about this process:

• GoGrid Image EOL Blog Post

New Base Operating Systems

---

We recently rolled out two new Linux base operating systems which are live and available in the GoGrid portal:

• CentOS 5.3 (32- and 64-bit)
• RHEL 5.4  (32- and 64-bit)

Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor Your GoGrid Servers

---

Monitoring your GoGrid infrastructure is an important task that should not be overlooked. Our Technology Evangelist, Michael Sheehan, recently spent some time analyzing two new 3rd party services that can help you manage and monitor your infrastructure:
Server Density: Monitor CPU load, memory, processes, disk usage, network traffic, Apache, MySQL & Nginx. Keep an eye on your servers and get e-mail, SMS & iPhone alerts when things go wrong.
See the GoGrid blog post about Server Density’s service here:

• GoGrid Server Density Blog Post

CloudKick: Easily and efficiently monitor and manage cloud server environments with robust graphing, alert and other tools.
See the GoGrid blog post about CloudKick’s service here:

• GoGrid CloudKick Blog Post

Hosting for Haiti

---

With the recent earthquake devastation that crippled the nation of Haiti a couple of weeks ago, the country is struggling to care for the injured, rebuild infrastructure and basically survive as a nation. There has been tremendous outpouring of support from around the world. To that end, GoGrid was among the initial group of internet hosting providers to announce support for Hosting For Haiti, a site where all of us hosting providers have put aside our differences in order to provide release for Haiti. We have made a significant donation to the American Red Cross and encourage you to help out in whatever way you see fit.
More information on Hosting For Haiti can be found at:

• http://www.hostingforhaiti.com

Further details are in this GoGrid blog post:

• GoGrid Hosting For Haiti Blog Post

Become a Fan of GoGrid on Facebook and Follow Us on Twitter

---

If you have photos from an event where you saw GoGrid in action or met with some of our employees, we encourage you to post them to the Fan Page:

• http://www.facebook.com/GoGrid

We also actively monitor and send out messages via Twitter. You can follow GoGrid on Twitter at:

• http://twitter.com/GoGrid

As always, you can find more information about GoGrid at:

GoGrid Product Site – http://www.gogrid.com
GoGrid Blog – http://blog.gogrid.com
GoGrid Wiki – http://wiki.gogrid.com
GoGrid Forums – http://forums.gogrid.com

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly.

Thank you,
Mario

This email was sent out by our VP of Product, Mario Olivarez.

This week, ChannelWeb/CRN published their editorial teams’ choices for the 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors. The lists will also appear in the next printed issue of CRN. Each of these “coolest” lists are broken down into a few vendor subcategories including:

• Cloud Platform
• Cloud Security
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Cloud Productivity Applications
• Cloud Storage

We are pleased to announce that GoGrid is listed under the “20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors“:

The other vendors mentioned include: Amazon EC2, Appistry (a GoGrid partner), AppScale, AT&T, Engine Yard, Enomaly, Flexiscale, GCloud3,  Gizmox, Google, LongJump, Microsoft, OrangeScape, RackSpace, Salesforce.com, Terremark, Ubuntu, VMware and Verizon.

While we typically categorize ourselves as Cloud Infrastructure (along with AWS and Rackspace), we truly appreciate the inclusion in the “Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors”.

Yesterday, CloudKick announced that they have officially come out of beta and is rolling out a freemium model for their server management and monitoring service. With the announcement, CloudKick also officially launched support of the GoGrid Cloud in its management, alerting, graphing and monitoring suite.

CloudKick offers a variety of robust services to help you quickly and easily gain insight into your infrastructure hosted on GoGrid. Some services and features include:

• Monitor critical metrics
• Simple management tools
• Flexible alerting to multiple addresses including SMS
• Visualize performance data
• Multiple users
• Changelog tool
• CloudKick agent

Depending on the plan that you are on (they range from free to $599+ a month), you get a variety of services mentioned above. The difference in plans depend on the number of servers, users, data retention, alerts and the type of support you desire.

There is a special GoGrid Signup page (details below) that will automatically pre-populate your GoGrid servers within CloudKick.

Setting Up a CloudKick Account for GoGrid

GoGrid is the first Cloud within the CloudKick ecosystem to fully integrate the registration and signup process. As CloudKick CEO and co-founder, Alex Polvi states:

“With CloudKick for GoGrid customers it has never been easier to get your server monitoring and management tools up and running, in fact, our GoGrid implementation represents the first cloud provider with seamless signup and integration capabilities.”

To start, simply visit this Sign Up page and create a new CloudKick account. After that, just log in using your GoGrid portal account information. Below is the process to create a CloudKick account that automatically pulls in your GoGrid server information.

Enter in the details you wish for your CloudKick account.

After that, you are asked for your GoGrid account credentials (note: these credentials are not stored but merely used to pull in your GoGrid API key(s) or allow you to create a new API key):

Lastly, if you already have a GoGrid API created, simply select that and click Next, or you can create a new API on the fly:

Once you have done that, your GoGrid servers will automatically show up in the Nodes section of CloudKick:

Using CloudKick to Manage & Monitor your GoGrid Environment

Once you have set up your CloudKick account, you have a variety of options available to you to manage and monitor your GoGrid infrastructure. The site is generally divided into 6 main sections:

• Overview – gives you the current snapshot of your environment
• Monitor – allows you to view, setup and tweak your various alert monitors
• Graph – this section provides robust graphical interfaces to your infrastructure
• Activity – any changes or additions to your account appear here
• Change Log – if you are running Ubuntu (only distro currently supported, CentOS/RHEL and Windows support will be coming soon I have been told) and have installed the CloudKick agents, you can see a change log as entered by sysadmins and others
• Account – manage your CloudKick account here

I recently hooked up my personal GoGrid account to CloudKick so that I could understand what it can do for me. Below are a few screenshots of items I have currently configured.

On the Overview section, you see a list of all of the servers that are actively being monitored. Below is the expanded view of my server on GoGrid:

Within that section, you can click on the Monitors sub-tab to see active monitors for that server (green=good):

I restarted my server and the screenshot below shows an updated status (red=bad) – I also received email notifications (as I had configured those to be sent when issues happened):

Under the Graphs sub-tab, you can quickly create and view graphs of various metrics available (including ping, http and ssh) on that particular server (as reported from different monitoring/logging locations):

If you have the CloudKick Agent installed, you can get insight into the performance of CPU and Memory usage under the Diagnostics tab. (Currently supporting Ubuntu with CentOS/RHEL and Windows coming shortly.)

Within the Monitors section, you can view active monitors and configure new ones:

Basic monitors like HTTP, HTTPS, Ping/ICMP and SSH are immediately available. Other monitors require the CloudKick agent to be installed on your server(s):

Perhaps one of my most favorite items within CloudKick is the ability to instantly spawn an SSH session right within the browser. You have to configure a pre-shared key but once you have that set, simply click on the terminal link to open a dynamic SSH session right within your browser. Below is “top” running on my server:

Individual servers within the Nodes section can have Tags applied to them to make identification a bit easier:

You can also color-code specific servers:

You can “destroy” and “reboot” GoGrid servers from within the UI as well:

You also have the ability to include other Cloud providers within your environment.

GoGrid & libcloud

Lastly, the founders of CloudKick helped create libcloud which is a pure python client library for interacting with many cloud server providers. It was designed to make the development of products running in the cloud a bit easier. libcloud is now an independent free software project licensed under the Apache License (2.0). libcloud is fully supported on GoGrid in terms of lists, reboots, creations, destroys, images and sizes actions.

Be sure to give CloudKick a try for managing and monitoring your GoGrid Servers!

In an effort to be as proactive as possible, GoGrid has officially notified select customers of the removal (End of Life – EoL) of two specific GoGrid images. The users that were notified are ones that are actively using the images. On 2/9/10, GoGrid will be removing the following images from the GoGrid image repository:

• CentOS – CentOS 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux – RHEL 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2

I’m sure that some of you will have questions about this. In anticipation of this, I have compiled some quick Q&A’s:

Question: What does the removal of these images mean?

Answer: Simply that after the removal date, they will no longer appear within the GoGrid Image Selection widget.

Question: I have server(s) deployed that use these images? Will they continue to function?

Answer: Yes, there is no change to how your server(s) will function if they are using one of these EoL-ed images. Just be sure that you keep everything current within those servers.

Question: Will you continue to provide support for servers that are based on the EoL-ed images?

Answer: Yes, we will continue to support all Windows and Linux images that you have deployed using GoGrid, even ones that have been EoL-ed.

Question: But wait! I still want to use those particular images in my GoGrid infrastructure! What can I do?

Answer: If you want to use either of these images after February 9th, 2010, you will need to create a personal GoGrid Server Image (MyGSI) prior to that date. If you follow the process outlined in this blog post, you can be assured that you can deploy servers based on those EoL-ed image(s) after that date from your personal GoGrid repository.

Question: Since those images are being removed, what are replacing them?

Answer: As of the writing of this blog post, we have several CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) images available including the ones listed below and others will be added in the future:

• RHEL 5.4 (32-bit)
• RHEL 5.4 (64-bit)
• CentOS 5.3 (32-bit)
• CentOS 5.3 (64-bit)

The images below are a filtered set of images (filtered on OS and grouped by “GoGrid” owner) as of this writing (note that in the future, this set of available images WILL change):

Question: What if I have more questions about this? What can I do?

Answer: There are a couple of things you can do. First, be sure to read up on how to create, deploy and store MyGSIs. If you have further questions, you can contact GoGrid Support either via the Live Chat within the GoGrid Portal, or by logging a Support Ticket within the portal as well.

If you have further questions, feel free to contact me or leave a comment on this post. I hope that these proactive notifications are useful!

As all of you know, a devastating series of earthquakes rocked the Haiti region on January 12th, 2010, crippling the infrastructure, killing thousands and leaving even more people utterly homeless. While relief efforts are currently underway, the recovery and assistance effort is an on-going uphill battle with little or no relief in sight. Countries from around the world have rushed people, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid, but as aftershocks continue (today there was a 6.1 registered aftershock, for example), the fragile and brittle stability is being further shattered.

The bottom line, the Haitian people need assistance of ANY TYPE immediately and in an on-going basis, whether it be in the form of time, money or other types of support. Doing absolutely nothing is the worst thing that you can do. Even if you cannot afford to donate time or money, there are other activities that you can do to assist in the relief efforts (one example is listed later in this post).

The outpouring of relief efforts thus far is impressive, however, as a worldly community living under the same “roof”, we all need to put aside our differences and work together to help the Haitians in their time of need.

Hosting for Haiti Initiative

Officially launching today is an initiative comprised of a group of Hosting Providers who normally compete head-to-head. The initiative brings together several hosting providers including Rackspace, Peer1, GoGrid, The Planet and ServInt, in an effort to create a consolidated and organized front to provide monetary assistance to the Haitian Relief Efforts. HostingForHaiti.com is a site designed to provide support from the hosting industry, because through a unified effort, more gains can be realized.

The site is simply a place where you can donate money to the American Red Cross. Even if you don’t donate through HostingForHaiti.com, we encourage you to donate elsewhere. However, our goal is to spread the word that donations are needed. We ask that you raise awareness of this site and encourage your own hosting provider to become a participant as well. Today, a variety of prominent bloggers will be talking about our effort to provide assistance and we ask that you join in this process of social awareness.

100% of the funds donated through the HostingForHaiti.com site will go immediately to the Red Cross relief efforts.

What YOU can do NOW

Please take a few minutes to not only contribute but also help to spread awareness via Social Networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Click HERE to tweet out the following message:
“Hosters are working together to support Haiti Relief Efforts! Please donate & RT! Info: http://hostingforhaiti.com #HostingForHaiti“.
Or create your own message to share!

GoGrid will be donating via the Hosting For Haiti site and encourage you to do the same!

For Hosting Providers: If you’re one of our industry partners and want to join us, contact us at info@hostingforhaiti.com about joining the cause.

Other Ways to Help – Identify Photos

Last week, GoGrid contributed Cloud Infrastructure to an organization looking to provide assistance in a different way. Conceived and created by The Extraordinaries, the contributions you make are not only helpful, they only require your time in helping to tag and identify pictures coming from Haiti.

Visit http://Haiti.beextra.org to get started.

Using the power of “crowdsourcing” and API integration, you are presented with a picture (pulled from Flickr using their API) and you are asked the following questions (which change based on your answers):

• Is this photo directly related to the Haiti Quake (Yes/No)
  • No – removes the picture from the identification list
  • Yes – Asks if there are people in the photo
    • No – Enter in comments or tags related to the photo
    • Yes – Asks a series of questions (see below)
• If the photo is related to the Haiti Quake AND there are people in the photo, you are asked the following questions:
  • Can you Clearly See a Person’s Face (Yes/No)
  • Gender(s) – (Female/Male/Mixed)
  • Age – (Young/Teen/Adult/Elderly/Mixed)
  • Alive – (Yes/No/Mixed)
  • Anything Else? – enter in description or tags

You also have the ability to view other tags or descriptions of the photo. Once you have filled out the answers based on your best judgment, you can move on to the next photo to tag.

An example is shown below:

By tagging the photos, you are assisting in matching these images against the various missing persons’ databases.

As of this writing, the site has the following encouraging statistics:

You can see some coverage of The Extraordinaries’ efforts on NBC in the video below:

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/video.

If you are looking for someone or have information to provide, you can visit the Google Crisis Response page for more information.

Just Be Sure To Help

I guess the bottom line here is that there are a variety of ways to help in the relief efforts. I have outlined a couple above in hopes to get the GoGrid community engaged in assistance efforts. As an individual, you can do a lot, and as a group or organization, you can do even more!